Chapel Hill, September 2, 2026 (Yes Punjab News)
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has warned governments against keeping artificial intelligence (AI) out of their countries, comparing such a move to rejecting electricity and arguing that AI adoption is increasingly essential for economic growth and improved public services.
“I think it would be approximately as bad of an idea to say we’re not gonna have AI in our country as it was to say we’re not gonna have electricity in our country,” Altman said during a fireside chat with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
Addressing representatives of G20 economies, Altman said governments could choose their own regulatory approaches and decide whether to build or lease data-centre capacity. However, he stressed that using AI was no longer optional.
“The economic growth and benefit to people that can come from this, the value to a country is too high to ignore,” he said.
Altman predicted that AI would drive an unprecedented expansion in entrepreneurship and small businesses by giving people access to expertise, software and other resources that were previously expensive or difficult to obtain.
He recalled meeting a laundromat operator who used ChatGPT for marketing, legal-contract advice and managing vendor relationships, describing him as the first person he had encountered who had learned to use AI effectively to run a business.
Altman said the pace at which entrepreneurs could develop ideas had accelerated dramatically. “The work that we expected a startup to accomplish in three months is now probably doable in, like, 17 minutes with Codex,” he said, adding that the world had yet to fully understand the implications.
He predicted that future AI systems would function as persistent virtual collaborators capable of working continuously alongside people. AI could also broaden access to healthcare, education and other services that had traditionally been more accessible to wealthy populations.
Altman said AI would eventually become so embedded in everyday products that people would no longer discuss it as a separate technology.
At the same time, he acknowledged serious risks associated with rapid adoption, including cybersecurity threats, biosecurity concerns and excessive concentration of control over AI.
“I think some things are gonna go very wrong with cybersecurity unless people act quite urgently,” he said, warning that excessive concentration of power could undermine AI’s potential to serve as an “equalising force” globally.
Altman also stressed the need for major investment in computing infrastructure. Even as chips and algorithms become more efficient, he said, insufficient computing capacity could leave AI as an expensive commodity accessible mainly to wealthy users.
OpenAI was founded in late 2015 and began operations in January 2016. Its ChatGPT service, launched publicly in November 2022, helped bring generative AI into mainstream use by enabling users to create text, analyse information and write computer code through conversational prompts.
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